There has been developed a contact lens for changing the shape of the cornea of a patient by being mounted during sleep and the like, and correcting myopia, hyperopia, and/or astigmatism at the time when the contact lens is removed.
When the above-described contact lens is not put on for a long period, myopia or hyperopia is returned to its original condition by a restoring force of the cornea, thus it is desirable for the cornea to be fixed in a corrected state.
On the other hand, there has been known a refraction correction surgery in which a corneal tissue in a state of being infiltrated with riboflavin (vitamin B2) is irradiated with ultra-violet rays for crosslinking collagens constituting the cornea to one another, thereby enhancing strength of the cornea and fixing the cornea.
For crosslinking the cornea, while opening the eye of a patient, a riboflavin solution is dropped from a cylindrical reservoir unit mounted on the cornea so as to be infiltrated into the cornea.
Further, in Patent Literature 1, the present inventor proposed a contact lens for cornea-correction crosslinking and a cornea-correction crosslinking method.
This method is intended to fix the shape of a cornea to some extent in a state of being corrected by a contact lens by combining a crosslinking method and a cornea-correction contact lens.
Also in this case, as the above-mentioned method, infiltration of a riboflavin solution is performed with the cornea-correction contact lens being removed.
As such, when a riboflavin solution is dropped for infiltration while the eye of a patient being opened, there are such problems that the patient is restrained in a state of opening the eye for a long time (about 30 minutes), and since not all dropped riboflavin solution infiltrates into the cornea and most of it leaks outside, a physician needs to frequently carry out a task of absorbing the leaked riboflavin solution. Furthermore, when ultra-violet ray irradiation is performed, a contact lens is mounted after a riboflavin solution infiltrates into the cornea, thus there is such a problem that deformation characteristic of the cornea becomes different from that before infiltration of the riboflavin solution, making it impossible to sufficiently correct the cornea.